An extension to add any search engine to Safari 5

Mar 03, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: canisbos

It was fairly incredible to me that Safari still does not support extending its search bar with additional search engines beyond Google, Bing, and Yahoo, or that it does not support searching from the address bar like every other modern browser. There have been SIMBL-based extensions that add these missing features, but many of us shy away from these because they seem somehow unclean.

Thanks to Apple's official extension API introduced in Safari 5, there are now several native and free extensions that alleviate, if not entirely eliminate, these Safari shortcomings. The one I wrote is called PopSearch. It makes adding arbitrary search engines to Safari pretty easy; and using them, fast and convenient.

Now, you have to understand that native Safari extensions are not allowed to modify the address bar or the search bar, so PopSearch will still not let you search from the address bar. Instead, it does what seemed to me to be the next best thing: when you press a customizable hotkey (Command+K by default), a small search bar pops up, where you can enter some search terms, select an engine, and press Enter to execute the search.

PopSearch has a few nice features:

While not a perfect solution to Safari's search issues, PopSearch does improve the situation quite a bit. Once you get used to using it, it just seems like part of the browser.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. This author submitted a few of his Safari extensions for consideration as hints, and I thought this one was a good representative example. There were some other interesting things and I refer you to his web site to take a look at and try them out if you like.]

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